“I can’t. Not until I know what’s on that mountain.”
“Well …” Ixchel pulls out her Ek Naab phone and gives me a rueful grin. “I hate to tell you this, but …”
I groan. “Don’t.”
“Montoyo’s not happy either. Read this text from Benicio.”
Ixchel, if you are still with Josh, BRING HIM BACK. Montoyo has ordered us back. If I’m not in Ek Naab with Josh AND you by tomorrow afternoon, we’re all in BIG TROUBLE, me most of all, and I will NEVER forgive you.
I close my eyes and sigh. “Just one more day. That’s all I need. I’ve given them so much—what have they ever done for me?”
“Benicio saved your life,” Ixchel suggests. “Twice.”
“I guess. But to be fair—I was on an errand for them.”
Abruptly, Ixchel changes the subject. “Why doesn’t your mother believe you?”
“I don’t know. It probably all sounds pretty unbelievable. I thought it would be best to be open, but I can’t tell anymore.”
“Have you told her everything?”
“I haven’t told anyone everything.”
“Why?”
I shove my chair backward, and in frustration, push my hands into my hair until it sticks up. “It’s dangerous. What I know is so dangerous. I’m bad luck to be around. Can’t you tell?”
“Sounds like you’re feeling sorry for yourself.”
Normally, I’d be irritated with a comment like that. Right now, I can’t even be bothered to respond. Mom finding out at this stage was not part of my plan. I don’t know what kind of surveillance the Sect has on my house. But for all I know, they’re spying on Mom’s Web browsing. Which means they now know about the blog, if they didn’t before.
If so, I’ve been found out—again. The blog post doesn’t make it clear which mountain we’re hanging around. That’s my best hope to confuse them. There are four volcanoes between here and the neighboring state of Puebla. You can climb three of them.
So they have a one in three chance of finding me. With each passing day, those odds shorten. Unless Madison has another way of following me—but I can’t figure out what.
I decide that we can’t waste any more time. Tomorrow, we’ll climb. Ixchel doesn’t respond when I tell her the news—not for a few minutes, at least.
Then she heads off, wordlessly. Is she angry? Going to get ready? I really can’t tell.
I watch idly as the minutes run out on my Internet access. With two minutes to go, I have a sudden idea. There’s still something I can do to decode Arcadio’s riddle. I type a line from his letter into the search engine:
Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad.
The line is a quotation from a writer and poet named Borges. When I read the line in context, the hairs on the back of my neck seem to prickle with electricity.
The quotation continues:
Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.
I don’t fully understand the meaning, but inside my mind somewhere, a light goes on, like a dusty old attic being visited for the first time in many years.
This is definitely about time travel.
Arcadio is speaking to me from the future. He’s warning me. Somehow, I’m destined to be involved in whatever is coming in 2012. According to Arcadio, that is my inescapable destiny.
I don’t understand why or how. But the minute I read those words, I recognize the truth of them.
I’m meant to be here. In some peculiar loop of time, I’ve already been here. Whatever is going to happen on the mountain, it leads somehow to Arcadio and to the prophecy of 2012.
I’m light-headed with the weight of destiny. I didn’t plan on being led by my dreams again, but it looks as though I have been. It’s been there all in along in my dream about my father—the image, over and over again: postcards of Mexico on my fridge.
The postcards—a link with the past and my future.
“What am I doing here?” I say aloud, to no one in particular. “What would happen if I just walked out of here, right now, took a bus to Mexico City, and took a flight back home?”
I’m almost ready to do it. But these words stop me: “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river.”
Am I the river? What if I choose differently? If that river is diverted elsewhere—will it somehow just flow back to the same spot? Will anything I do make any difference? Have all my actions already been taken into account?